Publisher's Lunch says: Hannah Pittard's THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY, about a girl who goes missing on Halloween and how her disappearance unexpectedly transforms the lives of those who knew her, in particular, the neighborhood boys, whose memories, curiosity, and teenage lust keep them searching for information, rumors, theories about her disappearance for the rest of their lives, revealing their stumbling paths to adulthood, their tragedies and devotions, and her relentless enduring significance to them and the possibilities of her fate, to Lee Boudreaux at Ecco, for publication in Winter 2011, by Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord Literistic (NA).
Indichik says: Enough with the missing-kid books already, okay? It isn't just that this sounds exactly like The Lovely Bones, which it does (and I swear I've already used this feature to talk about a previous ripoff of that book). But it's that the national "media" continuing to hyperventilate every extremely rare instance of this, causing perfectly reasonable parents to live in fear because they, ridiculously come to believe that this is some kind of epidemic. And I don't hold fiction writers above that standard, no matter how literary they claim to be. It's all a form of exploitation and pandering; like mysteries and thrillers, violence and death and grief ; people are (let's face it) sick and it's what they want to read about. I almost might remind you that traditionally, most successful novels featured children who didn't go missing. David Copperfield, anyone?
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1 comment:
Oh please. No it doesn't sound exactly like Lovely Bones. In Lovely Bones the girl is accounted for, we know what happened to her from the beginning, even if her family doesn't. And, oh yeah, the story is set largely IN HEAVEN. Just because it involves a disappearance doesn't make it the same. You could just as easily (and just as unfairly) say it sounds like the Virgin Suicides. Read it before you judge it.
And how can you say to write about death and grief is an exploitation? What? of the human condition? What do you think writers do? Get over yourself.
And David Copperfield? What century are you living in.
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